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If there is one difference that really stood out between the International and ATT versions of the One X, it's the battery life. For all the talking nVidia did about Tegra3 allowing world beating battery life, it really got served by the S4 in that regard.

In the fall I really hope HTC makes a One X like phone with WP8 on it, if I'm not feeling cheap I think I'll buy one.Reply

It's true. I'm currently owning a One X (international). I'm okay with the battery life (it's better than my previously HTC Desire). But as Brian has mentioned, software updates are on the way. The second update has been released yesterday. The updates are coming out nearly weekly! The improvements are huge in many aspects. The last update (released yesterday in Europe for unbranded devices) finally enabled 2D GPU Acceleration. That's right: 2D GPU Acceleration wasn't working properly before. It couldn't even be forced in the dev settings.

I really hope they can improve the device even more, and I'm pretty confident they will. To be perfectly honest, I would have preferred the S4 version of the One X. Nvidia still seems to have some problems with the T3 - again, I'm confident that the device's performance and battery life will improve massively over the next couple of months, but S4 seems to be the safer bet.Reply

i know its offtopic, however, how come it seems like the Droid Razr performs like 40% better than the galaxy nexus 58.7 fps vs 33.1 when they both have the same SoC? was there some error in the testReply

The Offscreen Test is a seriously flawed one. It's clear that the act of rendering to the screen has a different penalty for different GPU's.

Since you have to render in actual 3D applications, this means that the Offscreen test is worse than useless since it's _misleading_.

You can't even say it's a VSync issue because in this very article, you have the GLBenchmark test at 720P where the results for both the Global and ATT OneX phones are both significantly below 59-60FPS.Reply

Writing of the framebuffer to the screen is the least part of what each GPU has to do and certainly has less of an impact that differing resolutions between screens; I highly doubt that writing out the framebuffer is even that different between different architectures.Reply

EXACTLY! And don't forget that Android games also require a considerable amount of storage space. The game Modern Combat 3 requires at least 1,75 GB of free storage to fit inside the phone. With the advancement of the GPU and CPU of smartphones we will soon see DVD sized games on handhelds. Imagine having 5 - 10 such games on a smartphone.

The internal storage that comes with smartphones these days are abysmally low and a lot of people out there don't want to rely on some sleazy cloud storage solution, especially when travelling around the world.Reply

I agree - a (micro) SD card is a necessity. I can't carry TWO devices around if I want both a phone and a file player. Too many mobile makers appear to be clueless about this. Very sad to see it missing from such an otherwise excellent device.Reply

You do realize that review is for the Tegra 3 version no? The audio stack and hardware could be completely different on it, the AT&T One X probably shares more in common with the One S since they both run S4...Reply

Ya, I know that. There are other issues with HTC One, lack of Micro SD card, smaller screen than S3, worse quality construction most likelyl. Also, the video camera and still camera are not great either, and early benchmarks are showing that the Mali-400 and Exynos 4 Quad chip in S3 will easily beat the HTC One X:

Well if you need a phone right away, then sure get the HTC One. Considering most of us keep our phones for 2 years, I'll wait a month if it means getting a better phone. Can't go wrong with HTC One.Reply

"It's premature to recommend a next generation smartphone without testing the S3, at the very least."

That's a pretty silly statement. There's always a "next best thing" on the horizon. Shall we keep delaying a recommendation waiting for the next generation device? The Galaxy S3 is going to be *announced* in a few days, which says nothing of it's actual release, internationally or in the US.

In other words, it could be several months before Anand or Brian get their hands on a US S3. Consumers need to make purchasing decisions now. If you want to wait and hope that the S3 may be better, that's your prerogative, but it certainly shouldn't be AnandTech's.Reply

That's a pretty silly statement. There's always a "next best thing" on the horizon. Shall we keep delaying a recommendation waiting for the next generation device?

Umm...it's one thing when that something new is launching in 3-4 months from now. Samsung S3 is launching this week......

Do you keep a device for 2 years? If so, what's waiting another 1-2 weeks to see how it does? If you don't care sure. HTC One already has poor audio quality which is a big factor for us who listen to music on our phones. That alone is a deal breaker for me. Reply

Samsung has already stated that they want to announce their phones closer to their actual launch date. It's silly that the Galaxy S II was announced in Feb 2011 and didn't get sold in the US for another 7 months! And with the HTC One X already available, they can't sit on this phone for 2 months. Reply

Yes but I didn't expect that much. The difference between the battery life here is startling. The One X lasts 4 hours -- or 66% -- longer than the One S despite having a larger screen with more pixels. The battery difference alone can't explain that.Reply

I'm not certain that's correct. If you have an LED illumination you can locally dim your backlighting, but I don't think I've heard of that in mobile devices. If there's no local dimming, then theoretically black should be more power-intensive since you have to activate the LCD to block light transmission.Reply

1) No local dimming LEDs on mobile devices; it comes with high thickness since the lighting can't from the side, but must come from a backlighting array.

2) Yes, black in theory does require power consumption from the LCD to block transmission, but from what I've seen, it's marginal compared to the powerdraw of the backlight itself, wireless antenna, SoC, etc. such that it's moot.Reply

His point is that blacks on an LCD require far more power than on an AMOLED. Since a black pixel on an AMOLED = no power used.

I'm curious as to how the power consumption of a fully white AMOLED screen of equal pixel density and screen size compares to that of an LCD -- at equal brightness of course. This actually shouldn't be very difficult to test and really would be nice in one of these reviews.

Take the Galaxy Nexus or the upcoming GS3 and the One X, turn off everything (airplane mode, kill all background processes) and disable auto-lock/auto-dim. Turn the screen to various levels of brightness while displaying a pure white screen (several apps will do this).

Then see how long the phone takes to go from 100% battery to 0%. Extrapolate based on how large the battery is in WH rating.

Which is why I find it very weird that Samsung didn't go with a more stock ICS dark look for their Galaxy S3. ICS feels like it was made for AMOLED displays, and yet Samsung refuses to use it. Shame.Reply

I stopped reading at this line:"however the device does not work with T-Mobile WCDMA and the One XL page lists the correct air interface support."The rest of it was totally irrelevant after that.Pity. That screen has been getting tons of praise.Maybe the OneX2 will include a proper GPU and TMo support.Reply

(no edits?)It was already borderline without a replaceable battery and without an mSD slot. The frequency support just closes the book for sure.

Which really is a pity. The android phones first got started by word of mouth "expandable storage, easy to hack, total control, function over form", the antithesis of apple. Now they are racing to embrace all the bullshit that apple did 5 years ago. We don't need 7mm thick phones. Gimme the extra 2 extra mm of thickness if it means I get an mSD slot and replaceable larger battery, I'll be happier that way.Reply

Having come from a Sensation to a One S, I gotta say, I love the 7mm thin factor over almost everything else (the weight too). With dropbox and Google music, most of my needs for large storage has been eliminated.Reply

How do you get to this conclusion?Qualcomm scores a little bit higher in Egypt as in the Pro test of GLBenchmark. I don't know why you would put any importance to the off-screen tests for these two devices since they both run the same resolution (which is even 720p) which takes me to my next points. Actual games will be v-synced and how does the Tegra suddenly become faster than the Adreno even though they both are still rendering at the same resolution as on-screen but just with v-sync off. I've always had a hard time accepting the off-screen results of GLBenchmark because there's no way to verify if a device is actually rendering correctly (or maybe even cheating). Can you imagine testing a new videocard in the same fashion?Reply

Results can vary with v-sync because Tegra could be bursting to higher fps values. The offscreen isn't a perfect test either but it gives you an idea of what would happen if a heavier game that didn't approach the 60fps limit would be like.

Of course, those games likely won't have the same workloads as GLBenchmark, so it really wouldn't matter all that much.Reply

It doesn't need to come close. It just needs to burst higher than 60fps. Let's say that it would normally reach 80fps 10% of the time and remain 40fps the other 90%. Let's say S4 were to only peak to 70fps 10% of the time but remained at 45fps the other 905. The S4's average would be higher with v-sync while Tegra's would be higher without v-sync.

The point of the benchmark isn't how well the phone renders the benchmark -- after all, nobody's going to play GLBenchmark :)

The point is to show relative rendering speed such that when heavier games that don't get anywhere close to 60fps are being played, you won't notice stutters.

Of course, as I mentioned, heavier games may have a different mix of shaders. As Basemark shows, Adreno is very very good at complex shaders due to its disproportional ALU strength.

Its compiler unfortunately is unable to translate this into simple shader performance.Reply

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that v-sync'ed results will vary even if it's not close to 60fps. Because some scenes will require very little rendering (say, a panning shot of the sky) and some scenes will require a lot of heavy rendering (say, multiple characters sword fighting, like in Egypt).

The average fps may be well below 60fps. But peak fps may be a lot higher. In such cases, the GPU that peaks higher (or more often) will seem worse than it is.

Now, an argument can be made that a GPU that also has very low minimum framerates is worse. But we don't know the distribution here.Reply

I don't know but with it checked on an HTC sensation the battery never charged up and that was on the 1amp charger with the phone. Weird. (this was done on the latest Android Revolution firmware for ICS on the sensation.)Reply

I know this is less important that the other battery life tests you've done, but it would be interesting if you could include some sort of idle power drain test. For one, it would be interesting to see how the Tegra 3 would compare to the S4 here, since the Tegra 3 has the low power companion core for idle tasks.

Also, you included a color accuracy chart it your iPad3 review, could that be added to the display reviews. It's much easier to interpret than looking at the CIE diagram.

Thanks for the great review... I'm pretty tempted to buy a white One X after this. I've been impatiently waiting and refreshing Anandtech for weeks now for this review!Reply

The 40nm LP process used for the companion core may be a bit of a gimmick compared to the next generation smaller process fabs. In other words, it's clear that the 40nm LP process cuts down on consumption compared to the 40nm general process (so, compared with the Tegra 2 which is two cores at 40nm general process, there is battery savings).

However, it could very well be (and is likely) that even the 40nm LP process cannot compete with the 28nm fabrication process used in the Snapdragon S4.

It would be interesting to see, but my bet would be that the S4 wins even on idle.Reply

The only thing similar is the phone talk time battery life. Since the Krait has an advantage of 3G/4G integration and die size, the talk function largely removes 3G/4G function from the test (which Tegra does not have integrated), and the talk function itself is not too intensive.Reply

I'd like to think that my incessant whining in the mobile forums are responsible for Exynos missing from the glbenchmark charts :) Broken scores, I tell ya!!!PLEASE, as a favor to us old 2011 phone owners, re-review phones like the Sensation and Galaxy S2 now that they've gotten ICS.Reply

battery life vs capacity is useless if the end user can't replace/expand the battery. it doesn't matter if phone A lasts 7 hours with a smaller battery but phone B lasts 9 hours with a bigger battery. if both batteries are fixed, phone B lasts longer, period. now maybe an overall comparison of phone A vs B with all benchies summarized would be good, but even then cost on the same carrier would need to be considered .Reply

The normalized portions is strictly for showing the efficiency of the phone as a whole package. In the case of the One X and XL, we get a rare opportunity to compare efficiencies without worrying about software, screens, battery manufacturer, etc, as they are all identical. We're then left with a pretty good grasp of how the S4 SoC compares to the Tegra3 SoC, as apples to apples as it's going to get. I'd suggest that maybe it's time you just started skipping over that part if you can't understand the relevance.Reply

How come there wasn't any comment on the ludicrously small storage space on this phone? How is 16 GB of flash acceptable in a TOP END Q2 2012 phone?!?

This thing costs well over $600 and we only get 16 GB of flash! How much does slow NAND cost? Would an additional 16 GB of storage really cut into the bottom line? How about making 64 GB standard? High performance SSDs are going for $1/GB, and the NAND in these phones is no where near that performance level... food for thought.

Why must HTC play down to Apple's level, then yet provide none of the upgrade options (which are in themselves insulting in a $600+ phone)?Reply

I really don't care if there's expandable memory, I hardly (if ever) used it, I simply use DropBox now if I need to. However, I have over 12GB of music that I listen to every day. How in the heck do these Android phones get by with only 16GB of TOTAL space available?

I use a 32GB iPhone now, and part of me misses Android. However, as long as these "top-end" phones only have 16GB of memory, there's no way I can use them. It's a shame, because I'd really love to have a faster phone and better camera...but I can't give up listening to music.Reply

The problem with stream music is that the majority of phone planes have data caps. Also, streaming music is more battery intensive than just playing local music files.

Also, the way the partitions are for the One X, you only have 2 GB for apps, which is perhaps just enough for heavy users today; however, apps are getting bigger, not smaller. I suspect that 2 GBs of app storage space will be too small for a large number of users during the reasonable lifetime of this phone (next 2-3 years). If anything, they should have made it 3 or 4 GB, but then the insanely small amount of room for pictures and video storage would be a limiting factor. Their real problem is they were just too ridiculously stingy with the amount of integrated flash and it's a real shame because this is a beautiful device.Reply

The Sprint version has a larger battery and some other hardware changes, I was wondering if Anand is planning on reviewing it so we can see how much the battery changes add and other stuff like Bloatware compares to this one.Reply

Slightly larger battery, kickstand, camera button, microSD slot, and a completely different casing made mostly out of aluminum (and some glossy plastic). Aesthetics aside, I don't see how it can be anything but an improvement, unless the CDMA stack gets bungled and it somehow wrecks battery life.

Sprint has been pretty good about bloatware lately too, they were one of the first carriers to let you uninstall/hide some of their bloat even before ICS allowed it (most of my EVO 3D's built in apps could be removed/hidden, not all tho).

Their network is another story but since there's no VZW in Puerto Rico and AT&T treated me like crap I'll stick with Sprint for now, the EVO LTE helped their cause a bit too.Reply

Thanks so much for putting out this review this quickly, I know carriers often have a hand in what phones you get to review etc (this one in particular being pre release) but AT reviews continue to be a cut above anything else on the web.

I seriously don't understand how you can be the only site out there that has a standardized method for battery life testing... Even beyond that tho, AT's reviews are simply the most informative, detailed, and less subjective phone reviews out there, bar none.Reply

Oh and I'm looking forward to the One S and international variant reviews... I'm not even getting any of these phones but I still appreciate the work a lot. Any clue if you'll eventually get an EVO 4G LTE in for review? :pReply

How did you remove the "AT&T" in the upper-left corner of the display in the status bar? Engadget had it displaying there in all of their pics. I would like to be able to remove that as well if I bought this since I don't need a reminder that I'm on AT&T's network.Reply

It's kinda curious AT&T is the only carrier doing that, and rather annoying since it's wasted notification space. Kinda redundant too considering they also silk screen it on the phone itself and it's also displayed within the notification pane and/or the lock screen (what everybody else does).Reply

"What’s really interesting to me is just how many recent handsets from so many other OEMs have taken a similar design approach - microSIM, unibody polymer construction, no microSD card slot, and non removable battery. That combination of features seems necessary if you’re going to craft a device with competitive form factor this generation, and no doubt even more vendors will update with that profile. Polymer makes sense because it’s both a material transparent to RF, and easy to machine, and going with a microSIM makes sense since it’s all about minimizing area that isn’t dedicated to battery."

I strongly disagree with this trend and I think this is right up there with glossy 768p notebook displays in terms of absurdity and simply got to stop. It's not about making the device slim nor maximizing battery, as the One X stands out in neither. It's all about cutting cost and forcing users to upgrade devices sooner because the battery has gone bad and cannot be replaced easily, or the internal storage has run out and there's no way to expand it with a microSD. MicroSIM is an abomination created by Apple just because they can.Reply

"The One X on AT&T is really a One XL (L for LTE), however in the USA the device carries full One X branding. We’ve got the International One X and One S variants which will be reviewed in short order, but for today we’re talking specifically about the One X on AT&T."

Every time someone will tell me that Android branding is NOT confusing I will point them to this paragraph. Damn, you’d think the people at HTC are all retarded or something. Reply

I've never owned a smart phone so maybe it's not the problem it is on monitors for desktop and portable computers, but I'm concerned about these screens getting narrower. I'd like to see that trend change, I think. In this, Apple looks to me like it's doing a better job.

This screen is actually ever so slightly wider than last gen 4.3" qHD displays... Tho those were slightly narrower than the first 4.3" displays, so it's kind of a wash really. The iPhone's display is just smaller in every direction, I don't see how that's an improvement unless you have tiny hands or shallow pockets... If that's the case there's always the One S, it's barely any wider than the iphone, about half an inch longer, but it packs in a 4" display (shame it's Pentile qHD tho (.Reply

"The rear facing CMOS is a Samsung S5K3H2YX which Vivek spotted in the MyTouch 4G Slide. "

The Rezound has the same camera module as well.

I would love to see a camera comparison between the One X and another phone with the same module so as to see how much of a difference the dedicated ISP makes. Oh darn, guess I'll just have to go buy an One X now.

As a side note: thank you so much for doing this review. It is nice to be able to find something unbiased in the sea of hype.Reply

The decibel scale being logarithmic, it's pretty much useless to graph it linearly. You get the false impression that for instance something that has a 77dB loudness is 'just' 5% less loud than something at 80dB, while in fact it's a 100% difference.

The loudness graphs would be much more informative if they would convey these actual differences. There are big, big differences between speaker loudness of phones and it is a legitimate point of review.Reply

The confusion comes from the fact that doubling power to a speaker gains you roughly 3 dB, so a speaker at 600 watts is only around 3 dB louder than the same speaker at 300 watts. Those darned sine waves :)Reply

?It should be possible with proper hacking. The Rezound can essentially be modified into a world phone, since it has GSM hardware.The One X does have the required basebands. It will likely not work at all on T-mobile though.Never say never, it is technically possible. I suspect the probability isn't too high, but where would we be today if everybody thought everything was impossible?Reply

Im still loving my HTC Rezound 6 months later...and wondering why they backpedaled in some ways.Rezound has 16GB internal and 16 GB secondary SD and can expand to 80GB with a 64GB card...

Rezound has true LCD 1280x720, vs. One X SAMOLED...guess that one could be a toss-up to user preferences as both screens are rated top in reviews...especially compared to Pentiles. So it didnt oversaturate colors..thats a good thing.

Rezound has removable battery and can be upgraded to 2750 extended battery or higher.

Of course I'd love to know why Anand never published a Rezound review when I know they had said they had one!

The camera on One X "may" be better but Rezound has an awesome lens too, even if it had issues with white-balance on default settings sometimes. Replacement camera apps seem to resolve that.

I cant wait to see what ICS does on a OTA upgrade from Verizon...even if it's only Sense 3.5 for Rezound vs Sense 4 on One X it should still have better performance on Rezound on ICS over Rezound on Gingerbread. Alternate ROMS have shown that power...

On Gingerbread with extended battery I easily get 24 hours battery life, I can only hope ICS isn't worse.

The One X has a Super LCD 2 display. The One S has the PenTile screen. Also, I don't think you can get the same structural integrity with a removable battery because that means the back needs to come completely off. The device cannot be made from one piece and needs latches to hold the battery cover. Reply

I personally bought my first smartphone last week when Google started offering the Galaxy Nexus directly for $399. At first I thought I wouldn't like the screen size but after having used it for a few days, I can't imagine having something smaller. I received the phone in two days and have so far had zero issues. It came with ICS 4.0.4 installed.

The biggest selling point for me is the pentaband 3G radio. As someone who is loyal to TMO USA AND a frequent business traveler to Europe, the pentaband 3G gives me a lot of flexibility that no other phone to-date can. If either the One S or X came with pentaband, I would have bought one, even though I do like having a stock Google OS.

I have no doubt the HTC One X and S are great, but I am happy with my Galaxy Nexus. I don't think it will have a problem getting me down the road for at least a year or two.Reply

I'm always amazed at how in depth your reviews are AT. Love them, please keep up the great work!

Great HW, I'm just slightly disappointed that the US version gets a neutered 16GB of storage, with no micro SD slot for expansion. I know the big deal was to use Dropbox to help augment that, but with really no true unlimited data options for the majority of wireless providers, this seems like a very big trap door.

I also have read somewhere that the AT&T version doesn't even include Dropbox like the international version. Great job AT&T and HTC... /facepalm

"The phone is machined, not injection molded, from a single machined piece of polycarbonate plastic, and feels anything but cheap in the palm."

Can I ask where this bit of information came from ? As someone who works in the plastic moulding industry its just seems very unlikely on a mass produced product. I cant see any benefit from machining a thermoset plastic like polycarbonate as opposed to injection moulding Reply

There was a youtube video I saw at work that did an amazing comparison video of the one x, iphone 4s, sony phone with bravia display tech, and galaxy nexus. I cannot find for the life of me where it is. Important note that the language was in chinese, and the review was meticulous and precise. Cookies for the person who can find it..Reply

I'd like to know what percentage setting on the One X equates to the 200nits that was used in the review. I've read so many people disputing the possibility of the One X lasting 6 hours with the screen on based on their own experiences.Reply